Friday Social Round Up: Snickers in a twist, Bayern Munich interesting new signing, How Pinteresting.

Nazilla Allahiary

27th January, 2012

Snickers in a twist

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) is currently investigating confectionary kings Mars after they used entertainment and sports stars to advertise its Snickers chocolate bar on Twitter.

The company paid Katie Price, Rio Ferdinand, Amir Khan, Cher Lloyd and Ian Botham to post pictures of them with a Snickers bar, to coincide with a television advertising campaign. 90 minutes after the pictures were posted, Mars tweeted to explain they were part of its advertising campaign.

But the ASA received complaints regarding the Katie Price and Rio Ferdinand tweets, and is now investigating whether the original posts should have been labelled as adverts so that followers were aware at the time of the tweet. The Office of Fair Trading guidelines state that advertisers are required to be transparent when promoting products via social media.

In all fairness to Mars, the Katie Price tweet was clearly an advert as the star managed to correctly use an apostrophe, on the other hand the advert did imply that the size 6 ex-glamour model would actually eat a Snickers bar, which I believe is false advertising.

Bayern Munich interesting new signing

This week, football team Bayern Munich angered fans with the announcement that ‘a spectacular name’ would be signed to the club on Thursday, only for the fans to find out is was a Facebook PR stunt.

Fans eagerly logged on to Facebook and used the fan page app to watch the ‘signing’ be revealed, but felt severely let down when their own names were revealed on the back of a Bayern Munich No. 8 shirt. The page was then updated to say:

"Dear fans, you probably already noticed, that we did not sign a new player. This app is for our fans to show the importance of you for our club. Every single FCB fan is the 'spectacular new signing,' our 12th man!”

While the sentiment behind the stunt was honourable, over 3,000 angry users posted that it was a waste of time, and the club had unnecessarily got their hopes up.

How Pinteresting….

My latest social obsession is Pinterest; an online pin board site that allows users to post a collection of images that they love into categorised boards (i.e. weddings, homes, food etc.). They can than share these with followers, who can in turn ‘repin’ images they like to their own pin boards. The site is currently invite only, but users can apply to the waiting list and usually receive an invite within two days.

Alexa.com says the site is currently ranked 28 in the U.S. and 133 globally, but it is in the last few months that the site has really seen its traffic grow. The site’s page views have risen 131% in the last three months. Google Ad planner also revealed that users of the site are predominantly female (80% to 20% ratio) with 55% of users being aged between 25 and 44 years old.

Digital after life

We recently spoke about the Facebook App that will allow trusted people to release certain Facebook updates after you die, and while this is quite a light-hearted idea, it does raise the question; what will happen to your digital presence once you die? Well in the states this is being reviewed. The Uniform Law Commission has recently approved a study committee on fiduciary power and authority to access digital property and online accounts during incapacity and after death. In the U.S. Uniform laws are created when there is little legislation to follow.

Gene Hennig, a commissioner on uniform state laws from Minnesota, said “Fiduciaries need clear powers to act on behalf of the individuals in the digital world after death.”

Although he estimates the uniform law process will take three years or more, he believes it will let estates gain access to the deceased’s accounts, or allow users to dictate how their digital properties should be handled after they die.

Currently Facebook’s terms of services says it will not issue log-in details to family members of the deceased, although a family member can contact Facebook to take down the page or turn it into a memorial page. Should the family choose a memorial page; the account can never be logged into again.

If the beneficiary of the estate sends a request to Gmail and Hotmail they will send out a CD to the estate holder, which will contain all the account information. While Yahoo will refuse to give log-in details due to the company’s privacy standards. In 2005 the company received a court order to release account information to the family of a Marine who died in Iraq.

Another Super bowl ad…..

I know the Super Bowl is not relevant in the UK. To be honest, I couldn’t even tell you what sport it is for! But I am an 80’s movie fanatic so when I saw this I was soooo excited by this Ferris Bueller ad.